(This material was written in response to an offer from an English journal, but it was not published. Therefore, we are publishing it in TheBilge.kz)

My interest in literature began in early childhood. I was the only son in the family. I have an older sister. My parents doted on me as I grew up. I have faint memories from when I was three years old. Everyone in my family, except for me, worked in the field of medicine. My father had a touch of the poet in him—he was eloquent, loved to tell stories, and recited epics and folk tales with musical intonation and vivid expression. He had an impressive memory for fairy tales and stories. My mother, too, was a good communicator. I mention this because, during the occasional family debate, she would often outwit my father in words. Due to her poor eyesight, my mother could not read much. Perhaps that’s why my father often read aloud at home, making sure we could all hear him. This was during the 1970s in China, when the Cultural Revolution was winding down and society was turning its gaze back toward culture. Although books were not as abundant as they are today, people had a strong thirst for reading. My father collected books. He would even hand-copy epics and folktales that were hard to find. I still keep those old notebooks to this day. I first encountered the epics—“Kobylandy”, “Er Targyn”, “Alpamys Batyr”, and others—by listening to them. They became etched in my memory. Before I even learned to read, I would recognize the patterns of my favorite works in the books and insist my father read them aloud. Later, I began reading on my own. My journey started with Kazakh Fairy Tales and led me to literature. As a child, I had a habit of retelling fairy tales to those around me. Eventually, I even began retelling novels. My classmates still fondly recall how, back in university, I once summarized Gabriel Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” for them. Still, it was Western literature that had the greatest impact on me—and especially on my own creative development. At the age of 15 or 16, I read Kazakh translations of John Keats’s poems “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale”. That changed the course of my life. Having grown up immersed in fairy tales, legends, and epics, I had always been rich in imagination. I could easily drift into daydreams. And I think it was this trait that resonated so deeply with Keats’s poetry. His verses seemed to awaken the imagery, events, and inner worlds within me, bringing them to life through poetry. I was immediately captivated. From that moment on, my standards for literature changed. I lost interest in the realism typical of literature in a communist society. Captivated by the power of imagination, I embarked on my literary journey.

I've noticed that a certain image often recurs in my poems and prose: a rectangular shape—an object like a door or a coffin. Later, I realized that this imagery appears in the works of other poets too. You can find it in Paul Celan, Seamus Heaney, and C.P. Cavafy. Celan has a remarkable poem that I really like, where he says, “Bury the flowers, let people lie on the grave.” In one of Heaney’s poems, there’s a moment where he describes the wooden coffin of his younger brother, who was killed in a car accident. In Cavafy’s work, the coffin becomes a symbol of lust, desire, surrounded entirely by flowers. The scenarios in these poems are vivid, precise, and powerful. And that, in essence, is what poetry should be—brief, tightly woven, genuine, imagistic, concrete, and moving. The key is where the depth of emotions comes from. A similar image of the coffin appears in my own novel, “If a Cloud Appears from the West…", which I wrote in China between 1997 and 2001. I think I could not write a novel with the kind of quality that I wanted, but more than ten chapters were published in the seasonal Tarbagatai journal, which is printed in Kazakh in China. After immigrating to Kazakhstan, a few chapters were published here as well. One of them, titled “The Monkey in the Square”, appeared in Almaty Aqshamy (October 12, No. 124 (4842), 2013). In that story, there’s a scene set in a context reminiscent of Kafka’s atmosphere. A coffin is brought out of a temple on the center of a large city square. Two characters walk up to it and begin to touch its surface. One asks, “What is this?” The other replies, “It’s a coffin—for the dead.” Then he adds, “But not just for one person—many could fit inside, even entire nations.” At that moment, the lid begins to creak open. The two lean in and look inside… This coffin motif also appears in my poetry. In my poem “A Garden of Trees”, there’s a line that reads: “We carried a coffin in the rain; at the end of the winding road stood a door.”

Sometimes I wonder where this image comes from. When I do, one memory always surfaces. It must have been autumn. Our family lived in a small settlement nestled in the mountains, less than ten kilometers from China's northwestern border with the Soviet Union at the time. The area was called Barlyk—the sun-facing slope of a mountain by the same name. According to research, one of the world’s oldest wild apple tree species grows there. There was a cement factory in that region, and my father worked there as a doctor. I was seven years old. One day, the entire community was suddenly thrown into chaos. Anxious murmurs spread throughout the mountain village. Every household was ordered to dig a deep pit inside their home. We too dig one in the center of our main room—about two meters long and one and a half meters wide. At night, my father dug while my mother and older sister helped. I stayed close by. To this day, I can’t forget the sight of my father standing waist-deep in the pit, sleeves rolled up, drenched in sweat, shoveling out dirt. I also remember a group of officials coming to inspect the hole. They discussed among themselves, saying: “There will be war. This is preparation. The pit is for storing food, supplies, essentials…” Perhaps it had other purposes I did not understand at the time. Soon after, a sudden wave of evacuations began—especially of children. What remains vivid in my mind is this: each child had their name written on the front and back of their clothes on the white material, along with the name of the coastal province they were being sent to, and the names of the people who would receive them. When I found out that the boy from next door—my playmate—had been taken away, I asked my parents, “Are we going too?” My father replied, “No, son. We’re not going. We’re staying.”

From the hushed conversations I overheard between my parents, I gathered that someone had told them: “You’re locals. If war breaks out, the enemy won’t harm you… They’ll target others.”

Much later, I learned that all of this happened in 1979—when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and there were growing rumors that China would be next. Whispers of an impending war had begun to circulate.

Whether in China or the Soviet Union, history has never been written truthfully. What is written follows strictly the party line, or else serves the interests of the dominant nation. There is a systemic policy of suppressing the history of smaller peoples, forbidding them from writing or learning about their own past. When individuals—or entire nations—are cut off from their history, they become rootless, confused. They lose their worldview, their culture, and their values. In the end, they turn into an obedient mass with no resistance to authority. Perhaps that is why my passion for literature has always gone hand in hand with an interest in history and culture—especially the history of art and literature. John Keats’ two odes were the first works that filled this inner void of mine. In 1990, I entered university. That same year, I read T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” in Chinese. I had already heard of Eliot and Ezra Pound before then, but it was Eliot’s words that became etched into my mind:

“Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.”

Once, at a meeting with readers, someone asked me:

“In the introduction to your poem ‘Korkyt,’ you describe four types of human relationships—‘God-man,’ ‘nature-man,’ ‘society-man,’ and ‘man-man.’ Each stage ends with a violent rupture: the denial of divinity, the transformation of nature, social revolution, and interpersonal alienation. On what basis did you make this claim?”

I expanded on my personal view, though I don’t know how the audience received it. But for those who lived in China or the Soviet Union, there is nothing abstract or implausible about those four stages. My generation and those before us have experienced each of them, without exception.

Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union and China’s shift from spreading communist ideology to joining the global capitalist trade system did this all-encompassing, revolutionary worldview begin to lose its grip.

At one point, Francis Fukuyama declared that history had ended. But sadly, recent global events—Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, for example—have resurrected the ghosts of past horrors. We are now facing history again. In truth, it has never left. It has lived among us—in our culture, in our society, in the depths of every individual’s psyche. It is with us. That’s why we cannot separate it from art, from literature, from poetry.

In 2003, when the U.S. and its allies opened the war to Iraq, I began writing my poem "A Garden of Trees". I wrote it steadily, without pause. Only after completing it and reading it in full did I realize just how deeply that war had affected my inner world. The unity and poetic cohesion of the text bore witness to this. Clearly, there is a profound fear, an anxiety within me regarding war. But it’s not just mine—it belongs to all the people who lived in the region I’m from.

This fear is usually dormant. Even I don’t always notice it. But our history is one of war, of forced migration across shifting borders, of man-made famine, political repression, executions, prison camps, and being turned into a nuclear test site against our will. In short: it is a history of people who have never had agency over their own fate, people who could be erased—physically or spiritually—at any moment. This fear runs deep. It dwells in the shadows. It only rises to the surface when something awakens it. The war—and the poem—were proof of that. And today, something even more dreadful is unfolding. We are facing a war far more catastrophic than what we saw in 2003.

In 2014, when Russia launched its war and seized Crimea from Ukraine, I happened to be at a gathering in Almaty. We drank a little. After the event, a friend—seeing I was somewhat drunk—decided to take me home by taxi. The next day, he said to me:

“Ardakh, do you know what kind of soul you have? Last night, in the taxi, you were shouting, ‘Ukraine! Ukraine!’ with all your being. I kept telling you to stop, but you would not listen. I was so embarrassed in front of the driver. You sounded like someone who had lived through that war yourself.”

I just smiled and looked at him. I did not say anything like: “War is starting.” But I feel I have fear. Who isn’t afraid of war? The fear was real. Who isn’t afraid of war? Only those devoid of reason, of conscience, of basic humanism could be unafraid of war. Only they would ever start one. Once war begins, no one can stop it. Not even the butchers who ignited it have the power to rein it back. It only stops once it has shattered everything. No one can escape its reach. Another name for war is fear. People who have never experienced war, persecution, or instability may not understand the fear just from hearing the word -- war. But for us, its weight is different. Humanity, it seems, does not learn the right lessons from history. To me, human memory feels like that of a goldfish—forgetting everything beyond seven seconds. The constant return of war proves this point.

Kazakh society today, having endured the ideological filter of Soviet communism, has not changed much. Similarly, what Thomas Hobbes once described as “a war of every man against every man, like scattered chaff incapable of unity—without the means to unite, and unable to do so.” After the Soviet Union collapsed, the power remained in the hands of former Communist bureaucrats and their successors—people incapable of building a creative and vital society. They look at new realities through the lens of the past and try to govern using methods familiar to the old regime. There is no real dialogue between the people and the state. We come from a society buried under lies, under false words and manufactured truths. We are a society that has undergone total deconstruction, lost our original essence, and are now stuck in disorientation. We can’t find our way out of the fog. Our values have been devalued. And new ones—capable of holding society together—have not yet formed. This crisis, this instability, seems to have taken on a global scale. Even in the U.S.—what is happening there?

So I ask myself: What should literature be like today, when the human spirit is so imperiled? What kind of text must rise to meet this moment—and how can we create it? These are the questions that haunt me. Through a sharp poetic language, I want to express myself, the society I live in, and, even more broadly, the condition of the world around me. Most of my poems and long poems are built on this conviction. Poetry has the power to cast light deep into the soul. It can speak truths that cannot be said plainly. It brings you face-to-face with your truest self. It’s clear that it could extend that seven-second memory of ours a little more.

02.05.2025ж.